Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on translation
- Preface
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- 1 The exclusion principle: a philosophical overview
- 2 The origins of the exclusion principle: an extremely natural prescriptive rule
- 3 From the old quantum theory to the new quantum theory: reconsidering Kuhn's incommensurability
- 4 How Pauli's rule became the exclusion principle: from Fermi–Dirac statistics to the spin–statistics theorem
- 5 The exclusion principle opens up new avenues: from the eightfold way to quantum chromodynamics
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
1 - The exclusion principle: a philosophical overview
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Note on translation
- Preface
- Epigraph
- Introduction
- 1 The exclusion principle: a philosophical overview
- 2 The origins of the exclusion principle: an extremely natural prescriptive rule
- 3 From the old quantum theory to the new quantum theory: reconsidering Kuhn's incommensurability
- 4 How Pauli's rule became the exclusion principle: from Fermi–Dirac statistics to the spin–statistics theorem
- 5 The exclusion principle opens up new avenues: from the eightfold way to quantum chromodynamics
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter sets the scene for the philosophical analysis of the exclusion principle that I shall carry out in this book. What is the role and function of a scientific principle? Whence does it derive its accreditation and nomological strength? In the philosophical literature on scientific principles, different answers have been given to these questions, from Poincaré's conventionalism to Reichenbach's analysis of coordinating principles. More recently, Michael Friedman has latched onto the latter tradition to defend ‘relativized a priori principles’ as principles that are subject to revision during scientific revolutions, but at the same time maintain a constitutively a priori role within a theoretical framework. This is germane to a reinterpretation of Kant's notion of ‘a priori’, whose purpose is to make a Kantian approach to scientific principles compatible with scientific revolutions and modern scientific developments; whence a resultant ‘dynamic Kantianism’. I shall endorse a suitable version of dynamic Kantianism to investigate the nature of the exclusion principle as playing a ‘regulative’ rather than a ‘constitutive’ function. The regulative/constitutive distinction has a distinguished philosophical pedigree in Kant and in the neo-Kantian tradition of Ernst Cassirer, as I shall spell out in Section 1.4.
Introduction
In a letter to Alfred Landé on 24 November 1924, Wolfgang Pauli announced an ‘extremely natural prescriptive rule’ that could shed light on some puzzling spectroscopic phenomena he had dealt with in the past three years. The foundation of the rule remained an open question.
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- Information
- Pauli's Exclusion PrincipleThe Origin and Validation of a Scientific Principle, pp. 7 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005